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It has been seven long months now that Eva Carneiro has found herself fighting a legal case against a much wealthier adversary, while the days and the weeks pass with one of football’s leading sports doctors sitting at home no doubt wondering when she will be able to resume the profession to which she has dedicated her life.

It should not surprise us how quickly football moves on without those whom it does not consider indispensable. Jose Mourinho’s severance deal from Chelsea in December will have been finalised soon after his car swept out the gates at Cobham for the last time because that is the way that football has always done things. Players and managers paid first, and the rest can wait come rain, shine, administration or bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, one woman who refused to be bullied live on national television finds her own case moving with the speed of the modern day Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Her career is on hold, her occasional public appearances a frenzy of media attention followed by weeks of waiting for the next development in the case that moves at glacial pace.

Carneiro has an ongoing battle with her former club

Her treatment has been a disgrace, not least from a club that throws millions of pounds at failing managers to pack their bags and leave. A disgrace because Carneiro was once the person Chelsea entrusted with the health of their most-valued employees and, as every in-house doctor knows, it is rare that they are not sought out by colleagues for advice on more personal matters, or for reassurance about the condition of family members.

This case, with a valued member of the club, should have been settled long ago not least because Carneiro has no public voice, and nothing like the resources you might need to take on an institution of Chelsea’s wealth. You can do the simple calculation yourself: if Chelsea are prepared to spend anything upwards of £500 million on a new stadium, just imagine what they can lavish on legal fees for an employment tribunal.

Antonio Conte will leave Italy this summer and is widely expected to take over at Chelsea

It should not matter that Carneiro is a woman, and it never did as she was promoted from academy to first team duties under the enlightened approach of Andre Villas-Boas, and then subsequently Roberto Di Matteo and Rafael Benitez. Working in the medical department of a top European football club comes with enough pressure without having to worry about being at the vanguard of gender politics for the 21stcentury.

One imagines that all Carneiro wanted was to be the best doctor she could be, but like it or not she has become a flagbearer for women in football. Once abused in unspeakable terms within stadiums, then publicly dismissed by a senior employee of the club and now with her life being placed on hold while Chelsea fight every inch of the way.

Carneiro attracted Jose Mourinho's ire in the first game of the season

Put like that it really is a wonder that football is not more outraged. The Football Association independent board member Heather Rabbatts returns to the subject as often as she can, like the loyal friend of a prisoner of conscience, and the Fifa medical committee and FA chairman Greg Dyke have offered support. But otherwise it has gone very quiet on Carneiro’s case of late, in favour of football’s familiar obsession with triumph, scandal, and managerial successions.

Chelsea’s position on Carneiro remains as unfathomable as it always has been. They will not discuss the case on any terms and would clearly be delighted if it just went away but they are trundling onwards, to the final battle of a dismal season on June 6 when the employment tribunal is due to be heard.

Carneiro’s evidence that day will be the final word on Chelsea’s catastrophic season of 2015-2016 and most fascinating document of the second Mourinho era. For a club obsessed with its public image, and the job of cultivating an impression of excellence for all football’s lucrative new markets, you have to wonder why they are not just doing the sensible thing.

The tribunal hearing is due to begin three days before the start of the European championships this summer and watching from afar, Conte, who has a court case of his own looming in Italy, will get a little taste of what life can be like at Chelsea. Only the club can know why they want this dragging on long into the summer.

Since she was admonished, criticised, demoted and frozen out at Chelsea on the days from Aug 8 to Aug 11, Carneiro has kept her counsel, and made what contributions she can to a profession she has known all her adult life. At 42 she should be approaching the prime of her career, busy, able and experienced. Instead she is forced to wait to have her say in court, an absurd ten months on from the original incident, in order to get the closure that should have been hers a long time ago.

In the meantime Roman Abramovich makes an 11th managerial appointment in the hope that, at last, this will be the one who ticks all the boxes. One thing Conte will know for sure is that if it turns out he is the 11th managerial appointment that does not work out, it will not take him ten months to get the pay-off he is due.